Re: Nature of Oracle-l has changed

Gary Dodge has long included a wonderful quote in his email signature: "Building tomorrow's legacy systems today, one crisis at a time". Well, those new legacy systems have been built and they are in production now. Hence, the changes to the nature of this list...

Six years ago, a CIO commented to me, waving down a corridor which had offices full of developers, "If I had my way, I'd get rid of all of them and replace them with lawyers. We'd buy applications instead of building them and then sue the vendors." My response was something along the lines of "if you think developers are expensive, go price some lawyers", but it certainly bounced off him. At the time, I took it as just another colorful comment from a colorful guy. But he was dead serious, along with his CIO/CFO brethren, and the passing of Y2K and the dot-com bubble pop has expedited his prediction...

Anyway, I personally think the only fruitful place for custom application development these days is decision support and data warehousing. Packaged business-support systems and operational-support systems are mature and viable; the only thing needed there is systems integration. Any custom development projects in these areas are the likely result of poor requirements analysis... :-)

However, decision-support systems have not yet matured to that point, and at the present time I think they still require much custom development, or at least advanced and imaginative systems integration.

on 8/22/03 9:14 AM, Stephane Paquette at stephane.paquette_at_standardlife.ca wrote:

> It also seems that once the big canned application are up and running,
> companies are outsourcing more and more the operations.
>
> Those canned applications need to be integrated and that's the best and last
> place where DBA and dev people can be today, in the BI place.
>
> Here, in the architecture principles we are buying instead of developping.
> That's easy to do for payroll and that kind of stuff. But when you have over
> 20 bought applications, you need something to integrate all this to an ODS
> and or DW. And those 2 are not in the canned application market (not yet,
> I've heard from an Oracle DW consulting manager that Oracle wants to
> automate that part also).
>
>
>
> Stephane Paquette
> Administrateur de bases de donnees
> Database Administrator
> Standard Life
> www.standardlife.ca
> Tel. (514) 499-7999 7470 and (514) 925-7187
> stephane.paquette_at_standardlife.ca <mailto:stephane.paquette_at_standardlife.ca>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Mladen Gogala
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 11:49 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> There is another thing happening: companies are more and more relying on
> canned,
> off the shelf applications, in a hope to become "compliant with present
> standards".
> That has dramatically cut down the number of needed developers, because if
> you don't
> have to develop your general ledger, payroll, CRM and HR software, you only
> need
> IT staffers to monitor production.
> That is why I think that Jonathan Lewis is wrong in his "Practical
> Databases" when he talks
> about "DBA being a repository of knowledge". No, the role of the DBA today
> is the one
> of a crane operator: "just get the darned thing going, buddy". DBA is a
> mechanic that
> fixes database when it's slow, and that's it. The business role of IT is no
> longer
> to be at the forefront of the organization, but to keep thins running and do
> what
> business people tell them to do. Companies are no longer doing development
> are leaving
> cooking to the cooks and software development to the big software companies.
> One of the reasons is also the culture clash among very well educated,
> liberal and hippie
> computer geeks and somewhat less educated "old school" drill sergeant type
> managers who want
> everybody to be at their desks at 7:30, cleanly shaven, no jeans, no "surf
> naked" Dilbert
> T-shirts or "I am a DMCA circumvention device" T-shirts. Basically, what I'm
> noticing is
> sort of "returning to the roots" cultural movement where business management
> no longer
> wants to tolerate the laid back IT culture. When cost cutting decisions are
> made, IT people
> are the 1st to go. They stil need DBA's because they'd better have somebody
> monitoring
> their multi-TB databases, but development is no longer necessary. IT
> applications
> are going to be as standardized as a stapler, so there is less and less need
> for development.
> Friends, we're dinosaurs, a dying breed. I'm considering a career of a
> second
> hand car salesman or a real estate agent.
>
> --
> Mladen Gogala
> Oracle DBA
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Stephane Paquette
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 10:29 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> That's why my post on historic tables and views seem lonely ....;-)
>
>
> Stephane
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Jared Still
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 2:19 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
>
> Has anyone else noticed?
>
> Not so long ago, we saw quite a few more questions about
> such things as data modeling, application security architecture, physical
> database design, and Oracle Designer
>
> Not so much anymore.
>
> Do you think it's because there are so few development projects taking
> place? Seems like in house development died with the dot bomb and has not
> begun to recover.
>
> I know at my place of employment there is very little development, but that
> is due more to the size and nature of this place, as
> well as the management. ( they don't like in house development :( )
>
> Now I spend my days with stuff like making NetBackup work with Oracle,
> migrating SAP all over the place and keeping things running.
>
> Not that we haven't always done those things, but I miss some not having a
> good development project. Ah, to do some real
> data modeling again.
>
> Just some food for thought.
>
> Jared
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Jared Still
> INET: jkstill_at_cybcon.com
>
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> --
> Author: Stephane Paquette
> INET: stephane.paquette_at_standardlife.ca
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> --
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> --
> Author: Mladen Gogala
> INET: mladen_at_wangtrading.com
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-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Tim Gorman
  INET: tim_at_sagelogix.com

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